Qualcomm is the leading mobile chipset manufacturer, owing to its Snapdragon series of chips that are featured on most, if not all major smartphones from the top brands, especially in the flagship segment, which is catered to via the company’s 800 series of chips. The Snapdragon 888 was this year’s latest and greatest chipset, but, like always, its successor is here and it’s even better than what the 888 had to offer. This is quite interesting, considering how, at the time of its launch, the Snapdragon 888 was tipped to take the fight to the A-series of chipsets from Apple and whilst it came close, it did not defeat it in any sense, this might change soon. The popular chipset manufacturer on Monday launched the Snapdragon 888 Plus SoC during the Mobile World Congress showcase, with the chip acting as the flagship chipset from the company. Smartphones featuring the best of the best chipset will be launched later this year, with Qualcomm stating that the Plus variant comes with increased CPU performance and is paired with the Cortex-X1-CPU which is now clocked to 2.995 GHz.
What Do We Know About Qualcomm’s Latest Flagship Chip
Qualcomm has further mentioned that the new chip will feature in high-end devices from Q3 2021, with the chipset featuring two major performance gains, the first of which is the aforementioned boost in the SoC’s core CPU, which is hiked up from the 888’s 2.84GHz clocking. Qualcomm also mentioned that the new flagship processor will come with improved AI performance, since it sports the new 6th Gen Qualcomm AI Engine which is capable of providing 20% better performance, resulting in 32 TOPS or Total Operations Per Second in contrast to 26 TOPS on SD888. The performance features found on the SD888 are also present on the Plus variant. This essentially means that the 5nm SD888+ gets the exact X60 5G Modem and Adreno 60 GPU. Other features of the SoC consist of support for Bluetooth 5.2, FastConnect 6900, triple ISP camera capabilities as well as Snapdragon’s Elite Gaming. In terms of supported manufacturers, the likes of Asus, Motorola, Xiaomi, Honor and Vivo will be the first in line to adopt the new SoC, with proper rollouts commencing from Q3 of 2021. Two confirmed devices to feature it include Asus’s ROG Phone and Honor’s Magic3 series of smartphones. Xiaomi and Vivo will also be launching flagship smartphones in the global market featuring the new 888 Plus SoC, which should compel the manufacturers to start offering the same, sooner or later.
